[In the following essay, Kalas examines the symbolic importance of the mirror in Gascoigne's The Steele Glas.]

In 1576, just a few years after the newly invented crystal glass pocket mirror was first available as a novelty import in England, George Gascoigne published a verse satire conspicuously titled The Steele Glas. The poem is an estates satire for the sixteenth century and as such levels its invective on all of society. Yet as its title indicates, the poem orchestrates its censure around a single paradigmatic object, the crystal glass mirror. In everything from its manufacture to its exchange to its use, the crystal glass mirror signals social and material changes that contravene the modes of production and signification that Gascoigne identifies with the traditional steel glass.

The crystal glass mirrors that Gascoigne bemoans were not the first mirrors made from glass, but they were the first that rivaled steel “glasses” made entirely of alloyed metal. Convex glass mirrors had been produced in Germany and Holland and exported to England as early as the fourteenth century. These convex or pennyware mirrors were made from forest glass—a thick and slightly greenish-tinted glass—that was blown into globes and lined with lead. Pennyware mirrors needed no maintenance, whereas steel mirrors, because they oxidize with exposure to air, required regular polishing.¹ But the convex surface of the mirror did considerably distort the proportions of its reflection. Although convex mirrors were relatively inexpensive, the majority of mirrors imported and sold in England, well into the sixteenth century, were steel and silver mirrors. Before the introduction of the crystal glass mirror, high quality steel glasses seem to have been preferred over convex glass mirrors.²

The crystal glass mirror was the product of two distinct innovations: a perfectly clear glass and a light metal tain. In 1500, Flemish mirror makers developed a new process for silvering the glass of convex mirrors, using an alloy of quicksilver and tin rather than lead. The new tain of quicksilver and tin made for a lighter mirror, both in its weight and in the brightness of its reflection. The practice was picked up by Venetian glassmakers who used the process to silver pieces of cristallo. Cristallo glass, an absolutely colorless transparent glass, was itself a recent innovation: fifteenth-century Venetian glassmakers discovered that the addition of barilla soda yielded a molten glass batch that could be blown very thin.³Cristallo was used primarily for the production of delicate and ornate tableware, but it also proved an ideal recipe for sheet glass.⁴ When blown into a cylinder that was then cut open and laid flat to harden, cristallo offered a thin, clear, and flat surface for silvering.⁵ This silvered crystal glass, thin and light enough to be fashioned into portable mirrors, reflected a clear, undistorted image and never needed polishing. By 1570, crystal mirrors were being produced in Venice, Antwerp, and Rouen and imported by goldsmiths into England.⁶

The new crystal mirrors were both wildly popular and widely sanctioned. Crystal pocket mirrors were comparatively expensive items and were frequently worn tied to the waist like jewels.⁷ The French moralist Jean des Caurres railing against the practice of wearing mirrors at the girdle, seems most offended by the fact that they are even worn in church.

O Dieu! helas, en quel malheureux regne sommes nous tombez? de voir une telle deprauité sur la terre que nous voyons, iusques à porter en l'Eglise les mirouers de macule pendans sur le ventre. Qu'on lise toutes les histoires diuines, humaines, & profanes, il ne se trouvera point, que les impudiques & meretrices les ayant iamais portez en public, iusques à ceiourd'huy, que le diable est dechainé par la France: ce qui est encore plus detestable deuant Dieu & deuant les hommes, que toutes les autres abominations. Et combien qu'il n'y ait que les Courtisans, & Demoiselles masquees, qui en vsent, si est ce qu'auec le temps n'y aura bourgoise ny chambriere (commes elles sont, dés à present) qui par accoustumance n'en vueille porter.

[Oh Lord! Alas, under what evil influence have we fallen? to see such depravity on earth as we see, to the point of bringing to church these mirrors of corruption hanging from the belly. Were one to read all the histories—divine, human, and profane—it would never be found that and meretricious women had worn mirrors in public until this day, when the devil is set loose in France: which is more detestable before god and before men than all other abominations. And though none but courtisans and masqued damsels use them, if these times are any indication, every last bourgeois woman and chambermaid (as there are, even at present), by force of habit, will want to wear one.]⁸

The crystal glass mirror was neither a distorted reflection, nor required polishing, and thus in no way served as a reminder that God alone sees and judges each person as he or she truly is. Indeed the clarity of the reflection seems to have been perceived by some as a usurpation of divine vision. Wearing a mirror to church flaunts this usurpation in the very place where one should be most conscious of being seen by God. The mirror had for so many centuries served as a figure of God's divine creation that it was an affront, or so it seemed, that any bourgeois citizen could produce in an instant, and without any effort or travail, a counterfeit image of crystal clarity.

To a moralist like des Caurres, the crystal mirror signaled a disregard for both the hierarchy of social estates and the estate of man before God. Even to less strident critics, crystal mirrors were identified with vanity, flattery, social climbing, and moral lassitude. In Cynthia's Revels, Amorphus, after referring to the face as an index of the mind, says: “Where is your page? call for your casting bottle, and place your mirror in your hat, as I told you: so. Come, look not pale, observe me, set your face and enter.”⁹ And Charles Fitzgeffery's 1617 Notes from Black Fryers describes a “spruse coxcomebe” who “never walkes without his looking-glasse / In a tobacco-box or diall set / That he may privately conferre with it.”¹⁰

The material history of the mirror seems to offer empirical confirmation of the Renaissance as an age of secularization, humanism, individualism, and emergent subjectivity. In Benjamin Goldberg's history of the mirror, the Renaissance was the point at which the Pauline doctrine that human knowledge of God is seen “as through a glass, darkly” came into conflict with the “clear mirror of humanistic philosophy.” Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, who is sensitive to the technical innovations in the mirror and the modern “banalisation de l'objet,” also identifies the Renaissance as the time at which the mirror ceased to be invested with magical properties and instead became emblematic of the modern subject. In his compendious study, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, Herbert Grabes claims that between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries—a period he is tempted to call “the Age of the Mirror”—the mirror metaphor shifted. Once a figure of divine ideality, the mirror became a metaphor for human consciousness and originality.¹¹

Deborah Shuger, however, resists the tacit link between the invention of the glass mirror and the emergence of modern subjectivity. Admitting that she set out to establish that very connection, Shuger concludes instead that the presumption is false, at least with respect to the Renaissance mirror. She quite rightly observes that the Renaissance mirror was more transitive than reflexive: the mirror was meant to direct the viewer's gaze toward a moral or spiritual lesson rather than back upon the viewer's self. The mirror may ultimately coincide with modern subjectivity, but it is not the invention of the glass mirror per se that brings about this effect. In fact, Shuger's conclusion that the Renaissance mirror “functions according to an ontology of similitude” effectively recasts the mirror as the image of a medieval mindset.¹²

The conclusion that the Renaissance mirror—be it steel, convex, or crystal—“functions according to an ontology of similitude” avoids making the Renaissance mirror modern before its time. But it also entirely dismisses the question of technical innovation. That the glass mirror did not directly inaugurate modern subjectivity does not of course mean that its material innovations were insignificant. Registering the impact of those innovations, though, requires a shift in focus away from the subject-object relation and toward the relation of matter to meaning. Grabes's important scholarship on the preponderance of mirror titles suggests that the key question in understanding the Renaissance mirror is not how the mirror as an object led to the formation of the subject, but rather how the mirror as an object informs the mirror as a metaphor.

Gascoigne's Steele Glas directly addresses the impact of technical and material innovation on the conventional metaphor of the book as a mirror. Although the poem may seem, by its title, to be a nostalgic, if not reactionary, throwback, in fact it rather fully apprehends the particular phenomenon of the mirror in the sixteenth century. With its assertions that the crystal glass mirror is emblematic of, if not instrumental in, broad ranging social and poetic changes, the Steele Glas chronicles the dynamic relationship of matter to meaning in the mirror metaphor. And in so doing, the poem demonstrates the role of materials and technology in a metaphor that for centuries had served not only as a figure of divine ideation, but also as a practical instrument for human contemplation of the divine logos.

THE MIRROR AS TEXT

Specifying that his text is a steel glass, Gascoigne aligns his poem with a tradition of scriptural exegesis that would, over and against the worldly vanity of a novelty item like the crystal glass, reveal its shadowy truths according to the Pauline example, “as through a glass darkly.” The mirror title is a convention that presents the text as a didactic exemplum, leading its reader through the process of contemplation to a moral or spiritual truth. The initial appearance of mirror titles dates to the speculum titles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—Speculum mundi, Speculum ecclesiae, Speculum iudiciale—and may have coincided with the invention of convex mirrors.¹³ The metaphor of the book as a mirror linked figurative language to material invention long before the innovation of the crystal glass.

Patristic and scholastic commentators had described Scripture as a mirror, though other “texts” were believed to mirror the divine as well: in some cases all of created nature was a text, in others it was the human mind or the life of Christ that presented a textual mirror of divinity.¹⁴ A person looking in an actual mirror might have seen in his or her image not an independent subject but rather a miraculous divine scheme of creation elaborated in the person's every feature—eyes, nose, lips, skin—and in the substance of the mirror itself. Sixteenth-century writers maintained that knowledge of the divine was accessible to human reason through nature. A more immediate perception of the divine was possible through revelation, and the mirror stood for revelation as well; at least in the cabalistic and hermetic traditions in the sixteenth century, mirrors and crystal balls were believed to have magical properties of vision and prognostication.¹⁵ From Scripture to nature, from the human mind to the crystal ball, what all of these permutations of divine text share—what makes them all mirrors—is that they reflect both sensible reality and eternal truth. These mirrors, like Scripture, reflected divine ineffability in the shapes of worldly things that were accessible to the temporal and sensory limitations of human understanding.¹⁶ The mirror title was an important device not because it likened the book to a mirror per se, but because mirror, text, and nature were interchangeable and indeed inextricable expressions of the divine logos.

A text was deemed creditable if it could be said to mirror the divine idea and, in turn, mirrors were creditable if they enabled viewers to “read” their own images correctly. This was true of actual mirrors, and not just mirrors as metaphors. Heinrich Schwartz has observed that, at a time when large numbers of pilgrims were journeying to Aachen for the display of its four most sacred relics, Landgraf Ludwig Hessen returned from his pilgrimage to Aachen of 1431 with “mirrors and signs,” the latter being small metal emblems, as mementos of his journey. He also notes that Gutenberg was involved in a mirror-making venture at roughly the same time that he was involved in a printing enterprise. Schwartz believes that Gutenberg and his associates were making convex mirrors to sell to these pilgrims, who bought mirrors and held them up in order to capture the fleeting glance of the sacred relics as they were displayed. The display of relics, it appears, was not only something to see, but something to be seen by: the mirror betokened that moment when the pilgrim had a vision of and was visible before the sacred relic. Every subsequent glance at this mirror memento might serve to remind the believer of that glimpse of sacred divinity.¹⁷ The mirror captured a reflection of the divine which could be discerned not through any immediate image in the glass, but only by seeing past the transitory reflection of the body to contemplate or “read” the divine image of the self that is held by God.

The appearance of a mirror or a glass in a book title signaled that the text was both a reflection of divine ideation and a practical instrument through which that ideal might be emulated. This kind of contemplation was considered to be an active craft. In medieval discourses on devotion, the mirror is evoked as a figure for pious contemplation and private study. In her discussion of the art of memory, Mary Carruthers cites Gregory the Great, as he paraphrased Augustine: “holy scripture presents a kind of mirror to the eyes of the mind, that our inner face may be seen in it.” Carruthers argues that, in late medieval writings, memory is an active process and ideas pass through the body to be quite literally digested: “the full process of meditative study is complete … when what we read is transformed into our very selves, a mirror of our own beauty or ugliness, for we have, like Ezekiel, eaten the book.”¹⁸

By referring to his own text as a glass, Gascoigne seeks to invoke the tradition of discerning shadowy spiritual truths through the active craft of contemplation. But the mirror metaphor in and of itself no longer conveys that “full process of meditative study.” To recapture that sense of the labor of contemplation and reflection, Gascoigne must specify that his is a steel glass, a glass that requires the effort of polishing, some labor on the part of its user, before it can be expected to render a proper image.

CRYSTAL CONCEITS

This attention to the divine authority that inheres in things—texts, mirrors, nature—de-emphasizes poetic authority, for it means that the poet is also a reader of divine text. Gascoigne presents the didactic exemplum of the steel glass for his own benefit as much as that of his readers. Having earned a reputation for concupiscence on the page and off in his “riotous youth,” Gascoigne heralded his reformation with the publication of The Steele Glas.¹⁹ He declares in the dedicatory epistle his newfound intent to match the “magnanimitie of a noble mind” with “industrious diligence.”²⁰ Whereas his earlier work had dallied in sexual and poetic license, The Steele Glas occupies itself with properly productive labors.²¹ This is not Gascoigne the translator and purveyor of Italian rhetoric, but Gascoigne the devoted countryman, using the late medieval convention of estates satire to reflect upon the state of domestic industry in England. Disdainful of poetic conceits that have entered English verse just as any fancy new import like foreign cloth or the crystal glass mirror might enter the English marketplace, Gascoigne touts instead an invention, “from ancient cliffs conveyed,” that is both inherited and wrought. The Steele Glas, Gascoigne writes, presents “words of worth … With this poore glasse, which is of trustie Steele, / And came to me by wil and testament / Of one that was, a Glassmaker in deede.” The glassmaker “in deede” is the classical satirist Lucilius, who bequeathed the steel glass to those who would see themselves as they are “Bycause it shewes, all things in their degree” and the glass mirror to those who “love to seme but not to be” (55).

Gascoigne's steel glass links the poem with its past, consolidating its relation not only to the tradition of scriptural exegesis, but to the recovery of classical texts as well. Gascoigne laments that in these “our curious years,” everyone has a glass, but very few actually see themselves.

That age is deade, and vanisht long ago,
Which thought that steele both trusty was and true,
And needed not a foyle of contraries,
But shewde all things, even as they were in deede.
In steade whereof, our curious yeares can finde
The cristal glas, which glimseth brave and bright,
And shewes the thing, much better than it is,
Beguylde with foyles, of sundry subtil sights,
So that they seeme and covet not to be.

(54)

Appearances in a glass mirror “beguyle” and delude the viewer. The glass mirror is detached from “true” and “trusty” matter, showing things as they seem to be but are not. Gascoigne does refer to the materiality of the glass mirror: a “foil” was the tin and mercury alloy that was used as the backing of a glass mirror, and “site” denoted the curved plate of glass before it was silvered. But his material references are also puns and thus his solid references melt into conceits: the metal foil is a “foyle of contraries,” and glass sites “Beguylde with foyles” become “subtil sights” or views. Gascoigne's punning language demonstrates how, in the all too perfect reflections of a glass mirror, the material composition of the instrument drops away, leaving the viewer to a mere impression of the image in the glass.

This propensity toward the mere impression, toward “things [that] are thought which never yet were wrought,” is evidence, for Gascoigne, that “pevishe pryde doth al the world possesse.” And peevish pride is itself to blame for the fact that “every wight will have a looking glasse.” Thus Gascoigne also expresses the concern that a “glasse of common glass” can only turn back on itself, begetting pride from pride, and circumventing worldly dependencies in human thought and behavior with its hasty and immaterial reflections. “This is the cause,” the verse continues, “that realmes do rewe, that kings decline … that plowmen begge … that souldiours sterve,” and so on for eighteen more lines whereupon he concludes, “This is the cause (or else my Muze mistakes) / That things are thought which never yet were wrought, / And castels buylt above in lofty skies” (55).

Gascoigne's muse of trusty steel can reveal that the glass mirror is a mark of “curious years” that are characterized by “pevishe pryde” and “weening ouer well” (54). The glass mirror cannot reveal pride, but can only, like a conceit, recirculate pride in a new disguise. Gascoigne is careful to establish that the glass mirror works its effects only in the realm of human fantasy. The glass mirror can aggrandize the pride that makes “the world goeth awry,” but it has no bearing on the realm of temporal cause and effect. Gascoigne wants to point out that the glass mirror is not causal, but only conceited. In the lines immediately preceding the passage cited above where the glass mirror is first mentioned, Gascoigne seeks to explain the state of “this weak and wretched world”:

As I stretch my weary wittes to weighe
The cause thereof, and whence it should proceede
My battred braynes (which now must be shrewdly brusde,
With cannon shot, of much misgovernment)
Can spy no cause, but only one conceite,
Which makes me thinke, the world goeth stil awry.

(54, my emphasis)²²

The glass mirror provides no purposiveness, no telos for how “wittes … should proceede.” Looking for the cause of the world's decline, Gascoigne finds instead only a conceit, an immediate or incontinent cause rather than a temporal one. Looking for solid evidence, something to “weighe” his wits, Gascoigne finds only a figure, a trifling thought, a bit of fancy.

The glass mirror has no proper place in the temporal order of matter: it is either a castle in the air or a crass material luxury. The glass mirror is thus quite literally a conceit, since conceit denoted not only an inventive rhetorical trope, but also a fancy article or trifle. Thomas Starkey, for instance, writes of “merchants which carry out things necessary and bring in again vayn tryfullys and conceipts.”²³ Gascoigne himself remarks that “daintie fare” has quickly led to “excesse on Princes bordes, / [Where] euery dish, was chargde with new conceits, / To please the taste of uncontented mindes” (59); and later he applauds the emperor who cared not “For Baudkin, broyderie, cutworks, nor conceits” but only “such like wares, as served common use” (71). Conceit, from the Italian concetto, a word that has been so central in describing the fanciful inventions distinctive to the sonnet tradition, simultaneously refers to precious and persuasive trifles, objects that have too much significance attached to them.²⁴ In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Egeus accuses Lysander of having “stol'n the impression of [Hermia's] fantasy / With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds, conceits, knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats—messengers / Of strong prevailment in unhardened youth.”²⁵

The glass mirror is an object associated not with “cause” but with “conceit”: it produces “fantasy,” “prevailment,” or as Gascoigne puts it, a “foyle of contraries.” Unlike the steel glass, which offers a decorously imperfect reflection of divine intent in the causation of the material world, the glassy mirror proves to be not only a false reflection of reality, but also a false instrument within it. The glass mirror, instead of manifesting divine ideality and its social embodiment, provokes self-generated ideas in the minds of mortals. As a steel glass, poetic invention gathers and reflects the wisdom of its predecessors and polishes anew the spiritual and ethical reflections that may illuminate the conditions of the present. A poesy that would liken itself to the innovation of the crystal glass mirror obscures these intersections of past and present, reading and writing, of creation and consumption, and offers only topical conceits that are tied to neither a fixed place nor a temporal value. Rather than an object wrought by a known craftsman situated by his trade within a stable social network of material production, the crystal glass is a rarified conceit: an object that accrues meaning incontinently as it is exchanged.

GLOZING GLASS

Gascoigne fashions The Steele Glas as the didactic exemplum of a commonwealth of estates, a social order that linked a person's status on earth with his or her standing before God, and a person's land or station with his or her labor or vocation. Gascoigne's poem favors principles of social organization that are, quite literally, continent, grounded, stationary. Rendering his poem as a steel glass, Gascoigne chooses a mirror whose particular substance calls to mind England's natural resources and mining industries of tin, copper, and lead. He chooses a mirror whose particular substance must be polished with each use before it will yield an honest and true, if not perfectly glistening or sharp, working reflection. And he chooses a mirror whose particular substance will link the poetic mirror with the patriotic sword, and thus his career as a poet with his career as a soldier. The steel glass reveals even the poet's own labors of scouring the work of his predecessors. With this material specification, Gascoigne effectively foregrounds the active labor that comprises social tropes of birth, property, and use or consumption.

Above all, the particularity of Gascoigne's steel glass specifies what it is not: a new-fangled import, the crystal glass mirror. Whereas the steel glass is identified with the estates of the realm, with land and domestic resources, with social custom and degree, the crystal glass is identified with mercantile trade, with fluid and artificial value, with sudden social mobility. For Gascoigne, the crystal glass is commodious and useful only in the most fleeting and provisional of senses: in its exchange and consumption, it shows neither a coherence with the past nor a continuity with temporal causation. It is, rather, a conceit in both sixteenth-century senses of the word: a luxury item and a fanciful idea. The particular substance of the crystal mirror is the guarantor, for Gascoigne, that the reflections of the glass mirror are not grounded or continent like the steel glass, but utterly incontinent, in the multiple senses of that word. That is to say, the crystal glass mirror is fluid, effeminate, unrestrained, unmoored from terra firma, and—a meaning of incontinent that is now obsolete—immediate, sudden, without temporal interval.²⁶

The crystal glass mirror would have seemed incontinent in both its consumption and its production. Crystal glass mirrors were not produced in England until 1624. At the time that Gascoigne was writing, crystal glass mirrors were imported primarily from Venice, though also occasionally from Antwerp.²⁷ The manufacture of glass mirrors could not be tied to any English sense of place. These new glass mirrors, unbound to any continent land in England, were imported from overseas and valued, as products of mercantile exchange, according to the liquid media of money. The manufacture of these foreign imports was especially mysterious since they were the result of recent technological innovations and since the Venetian Council of Ten was especially strict in guarding the trade secrets of the glass industry in Murano, the primary site of glass production in Venice.²⁸ Glassmaking also tended to be a family trade, so that the secrets of the craft were handed down from one generation to the next, rather than shared among members of a guild.²⁹

What was known about the origins of these objects made them smack all the more of incontinence. One might trace the glass mirror to its place of production, but that place proved to be no less continent terrain than Venice. Nor could glass production in Venice be explained by the presence of any earth-bound material. The raw materials used in the Venetian glass industry were all shipped in from elsewhere: quartz-rich stones from the Ticino river, soda ash from the Near East.³⁰ Indeed what appears to have made the glass industry succeed in Venice has nothing whatsoever to do with land resources and everything to do with the supremacy of Venetian maritime trade.³¹

Finally, glassmakers do not appear to have labored according to degree in any traditional sense at all. Because of the hard physical labor involved, it would seem that glassmakers would be classed as mechanical or artisanal laborers. In fact, most glassmakers had an unusually elevated status as compared with other artisans.³² Until the seventeenth century in most parts of Europe, England notwithstanding, glassmakers owned the glasshouses where they practiced their craft. Glassmakers in Normandy and Lorraine solicited, and were granted, noble rights and privileges on the basis of their craft. It even seems that these glassmakers were resented for their upward class mobility, for Godfrey reports that other members of the lesser nobility refused to integrate them into the feudal establishment through allegiances of intermarriage.³³ In Venice, the daughters of glassmakers were permitted to marry Venetian nobles, and the average wages of master glassblowers exceeded by threefold the average wages of other skilled artisans.³⁴

Glassmaking was anomalous among artisanal trades because glassmakers were bound neither to manorial estates nor to the corporate guild structures in towns. The tricks of the trade may have been as closely guarded as the secret arts or “misteries” of any guild, but most glassmakers practiced their trade independent of guild regulation. When governed at all, glassmaking was regulated by contract law and legislative governance. This is evident from legal documents in the case involving Gutenberg's mirrormaking partnership: the documents reveal that the partners were seeking to protect the technical secrets of their craft after the death of one of the members.³⁵

Medieval glassmaking had not fallen under guild regulation because it was primarily an itinerant trade. Furnaces for the production of the crown glass used in stained glass windows were set up near cathedrals during construction. The need for a steady supply of wood as fuel was another reason for the transience of glassmakers. In England, glassmakers continued to move about well into the sixteenth century, often making special arrangements with aristocratic landowners for rights to build temporary glasshouses and to burn wood on the property.³⁶

That glassmakers continued to move about even when they had been granted noble rights and privileges indicates that the social and economic capital of glassmakers did not inhere so much in their property, as in the more portable asset of trade secrets. The trade secrets of glassmaking were often, like property, passed down through bloodlines, but unlike real property, they were mobile assets. The first patent for the production of cristallo vessel glass in England was issued in 1567 to Jean Carré, who had previously emigrated from France to the Netherlands before finally settling his practice in London. Furthermore, during the sixteenth century, cristallo production had inflated the social status of the glassmaker by identifying the work as a creative, imaginative, and noble craft. Hugh Tait reports that when Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol, son of Emperor Ferdinand I, set up his own personal glasshouse at Innsbruck in 1563, he requested that the Venetian Council of Ten select for his workforce “whichever of the glassblowers had the most ‘fantasy in him.’”³⁷ Glassmakers relied on autonomous rather than corporate trade secrets and gained credibility through personal rather than collective ingenuity.

The rapid innovations in glassmaking during this period, combined with the secrecy and relative autonomy of individual glassmakers, meant that glassmaking privileged imaginative technical inventions—inventions, not in the classical sense of refashioning or finding anew, but in the more modern sense of unique and novel ingenuity. The craft practice that produced crystal mirrors was not circumscribed by the traditional order of social estates. The conveyance of and demand for the crystal glass connoted fluidity and lack of restraint. But what made the crystal glass especially suspect to someone like Gascoigne was that it was incontinent in both its production and its consumption. The crystal glass could produce an immediate reflection without effort and without any temporal interval elapsing.

The material specificity of Gascoigne's metaphor is indicative of his general lament in The Steele Glas, that a commonwealth of local production is being supplanted by a newer model of specialized manufacture and overseas trade. But it also indicates Gascoigne's awareness that this new form of economic production and exchange simultaneously alters the way that a society perceives and represents itself. Whereas the steel glass, the object and the poem, are products of a domestic industry based on traditional estates and vocations—in which both the production and the use of the object can be situated in time and space—the crystal glass mirror belongs to an economic model that not only dissociates the object from the labor involved in its production, but also from the labor involved in its consumption. In this poem, material production and economic exchange are indivisible from the production and exchange of ideas. Instead of an object that truly reflects social reality in a collaboratively wrought image, the crystal glass, from Gascoigne's perspective, reflects the fanciful conceits of the private consumer.

SATIRE OF STEEL

Acknowledging that his classical bequest must be “scowrde” for its present satirical purpose, Gascoigne writes, “I see you Peerce, my glass was lately scowrde” (78). The poem polishes up an ancient legacy to reflect the estates satire of Piers Plowman, which in turn reflects Gascoigne's England as a system of social estates so overtaxed and disarrayed that petty vanities and corruption threaten to render the whole system obsolete. Gascoigne's solution is neither to embrace the new economic system of trade privileges nor to hold fast to an outmoded feudal order, but to preserve the principle of a commonwealth of estates through honest labor and duty, in accordance with degree. It is the job of the poet to link how things could be with how things are, to link thought and imagination with matter. And it is for this reason that Gascoigne insists on the mediated materiality of verse that is a steel glass.

The poem imagines the possibility of an ideal commonwealth, but only by way of negative example, as the inverse of actual labor and vocation in England. Through an exhaustive catalogue of occupations, the speaker imagines a time “when brewers put, no bagage in their beere, … When printers passe, none errours in their bookes, … When goldsmiths get, no gains by sodred crownes” (79-80), all the while enumerating the vices tradesmen and professionals and inveighing against the deleterious effects of pride at every level of human society, from priests and kings, to peasants and soldiers. The poem can indeed imagine things better than they are “in deede,” but unlike the false perfect glimmering of the crystal glass, Gascoigne's poem, as a steel glass, reflects that imagined ideal only through the tarnished surface of present vices.

Gascoigne is equally careful not to overemulate the past. Gascoigne “scowres” his glass to reflect Piers Plowman. And in so doing, he relies on a polished image of the past to reveal present vices. But he also invokes the history of satire as a tarnished genre, in order to turn the corrosive wit of his predecessor onto his own nostalgia. For Gascoigne derides poetry that would “bite men's faults, with Satyres corosives, / Yet pamper up her owne with pultesses” (77). By the poem's own admission, the social estates it would conserve are already outnumbered and obsolete. The last hundred lines of the poem contain a litany of the very merchants and tradesmen who had always troubled—and did so increasingly at the time that Gascoigne was writing—the division of the population into the three pat categories of peasant, knight, and priest. And the poem lists four instead of the customary three estates. Gascoigne's retrogressive posture, rather than nostalgia pure and simple, should perhaps be read in terms of the resurgent interest in Piers Plowman among sixteenth-century radical reformers who urged economic reforms to remedy the burdens that the decrepit feudal system placed on the commonwealth. As Lorna Hutson has pointed out, however, those same reforms very quickly enabled new forms of economic and social privilege.³⁸ Gascoigne laments that aspect of feudal society which, in principle, had guaranteed all persons a sense of place in society and before God: the notion of goodly labor according to degree. Yet in virtually the same breath, his satire acknowledges that the monopolies and trade privileges that make him wistful for the past are nothing more than feudal inequities in a new guise.

The poem invokes the system of three estates—lords spiritual, lords temporal, and commoners—normally identified with feudal social organization, but in a strangely altered form. “I see within my glasse of steel / But foure estates … the King, the Knight, the Pesant and the Priest” (57). Instead of the traditional three estates, Gascoigne lists four. He has added the king as an estate, separate from the lords temporal. In addition, Gascoigne notes that the priests are “the last that shewed themselves” in his glass (74). Though the enumeration of four such estates is an oddity, there is a precedent in John Hooker's 1572 Order and Usage of the keeping of a parlement in England, which lists four estates: king, nobles, commons, and clergy. Hooker consolidates the three classical estates of mixed government—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—with the three medieval estates of peasant, knight, and priest.³⁹ And Gascoigne follows suit, positing a social organization that amalgamates classical legacy and medieval custom. Consistent with the mirror that reflects it, this image of society is both an alloy and an old substance polished up for new purposes.

Gascoigne's ordering of the estates is not so much a critique of the church as a commentary on its loss of estate. Recognizing that the Crown's seizure of church lands diminished the priestly estate in England, Gascoigne nonetheless holds the office of the priest in high estimation. And on this point, Gascoigne is careful to distinguish offices as godly deeds rather than entitlements. “Although they were the last that shewed themselves, / I saide at first, their office was to pray” (74). Lamentable though it may be that the church is no longer the landed estate it once was, it is the godly duty of the clergy to maintain an estate through the office or practice of prayer.

Office is a double-edged word for Gascoigne. Well aware that the proliferation of secular offices and entitlements is nothing more than feudal privilege in a new form, Gascoigne inveighs against offices that delude men—men who are in truth no more than peasants—into believing that they have elevated themselves above their mean estate. Even so Gascoigne advocates the performance of one's offices or deeds, insofar as offices denote the labor of one's estate. Priests are listed last, but the most tenuous estate in Gascoigne's text is the peasantry. Nowhere is the decline of feudal society more pronounced than among peasants, and no longer is the plowman the representative peasant. Rather than dispensing with this estate altogether, Gascoigne enlarges the category of peasant to accommodate merchants, artisans, and tradesmen. The marginal caption “Strange Peasants” sums up the passage on peasants, opening with, “All officers, all advocates at lawe, / Al men of arte, which get goodes greedily, / Must be content to take a Peasants rome” (68). The poem closes with an appeal to priests to pray for the tradesmen who abuse their offices with occupational misdeeds like shoddy craftsmanship and pilfering. But these abuses pale in comparison to Gascoigne's disdain for those strange peasants whose offices are newly created and seem to have no relation to the provision of necessities.

Gascoigne describes the estate of peasants as “strange indeed” because their work no longer ties them primarily to the land, but rather identifies them with a dizzying array of “offices.” Some of these “strange” peasants would have been strangers indeed, given the number of foreign artisans working in England, for the new mercantile economy prompted the overseas exchange of both goods and workers.⁴⁰ And Gascoigne also counts English merchants among his list of peasants. In fact, Gascoigne devotes as many lines to merchants as he does to all other peasant officers and advocates combined. It is no surprise that Gascoigne's satire is at its most biting when he addresses merchants, that class of peasants which, at least to his mind, is least bound to the land, and least beholden to the system of estates. What is somewhat surprising, however, is that Gascoigne presents the merchant as an inverted priest. After reproving the merchant suppliers, their luxurious trifles, and the vain desires of their consumers, Gascoigne says that in truth he cannot even see these mercantile tricks or chimeras in his steel glass.

These knackes (my lord) I cannot cal to minde,
Bycause they show not in my glass of steele.
But holla: here I see a wondrous sight,
I see a swarme, of Saints within my glasse:
Beholde, behold, I see a swarme in deede …
Not deckt in robes, nor garnished with gold,
But some unshod, yea some ful thinly clothde,
And yet they seme, so heavenly for to see,
As if their eyes, were al of Diamonds,
Their face of Rubies, Saphires, and lacincts,
Their comly beards, and heare of silver wiers.

(72)

Here, Gascoigne truly shows his meaning “as through a glass darkly.” For where Gascoigne's steel glass clouds over in mists, his poetic mirroring is in its fullest effect. A swarm of saints takes the place of the indiscernible merchant. Heavenly profit proves the mirror opposite, down to the last figurative gem, of the merchant's lucrative gain, for the saints are “not deckt in robes, nor garnished with gold.” But in the steel glass of the poem, their “thinly clothde” humility is comparable to the most priceless gems.

The merchant, like every member of Gascoigne's society, faces the choice of performing his offices in his own self-interest or in the interest of society. But the vices of other tradesmen—the vintner who mixes water with wine, or the pewterer who infects tin with lead—amount to little more than a predictable nuisance: “Tush are toys, but yet my glas sheweth al” (80). But the merchant, as the converse of the priest, has the power to effect negatively every estate in the realm. Merchants, by the misuse of their offices, threaten to dissolve the system of estates, whereas priests, by their offices of prayer, promise the maintenance of men's estates.

The merchant is also the converse of the poet. The offices of the merchant can disrupt the very fabric of society, and can even cloud the perception of vice that is so crucial to proper moral action. What the merchant obscures with “knackes,” the poet must reveal in figures of truth. If it is the office of the priest to pray for the preservation of man's estate before God, it is the office of the poet to make visible the decadence of man's estate on earth. In the final lines of the poem, Gascoigne elides the offices of poet and priest with the plea “I pray you pray for me” that “together we may show all colours in their kinde.”

And yet therin, I pray you (my good priests)
Pray stil for me, and for my Glasse of steele
That it (nor I) do any minde offend,
Bycause we shew, all colours in their kinde.
And pray for me, that (since my hap is such
To see men so) I may perceive myselfe.
O worthy words, to ende my worthlesse verse,
Pray for me Priests, I pray you pray for me.

(81)

The poetics of the steel glass, rather than proliferating conceits as so many crystal glass repetitions of pride, ends with the repetitive verbal incantations of prayer. In the simple repetition of the word pray, the poem consolidates the voice of the poet with that of the priest and suggests, perhaps, that in the steel glass of satire, invective is a tarnished form of prayer.

THE TEMPORAL TEMPER

The Steele Glas ends with the conspicuous repetition of a single word: it ends, that is, by calling attention to its own medium of language. The steel glass, a duller and less precise instrument of reflection than the crystal glass mirror, always reveals that its reflection is conditioned by its medium. Because it oxidizes with exposure to air and must be polished for use, a steel glass requires the application of labor to produce a true reflection. A poem must likewise be read and digested before the fullness of its depiction emerges. The steel glass, as both object and poem, links production and consumption with reading and writing. A glass mirror indicates the extravagant immediacy of both poetic and commercial conceits, whereas the poetics of a steel glass, in its very substance, bespeaks a model of making and consumption, as Gascoigne puts it, “in deede.”

At a manifest level, Gascoigne's poem reveals the reorganization of social estates and the simultaneous emergence of mercantile economies taking place as he wrote. But Gascoigne's poem also seeks to explicate the dynamic relationship between those socioeconomic formations and specific discursive inventions. The steel glass is identified with a stable system of professional trades, the crystal class with merchants and social mobility; the steel glass with land and national strength, the crystal glass with fluidity and global commerce; the steel glass with divine authority and worldly temporality, the crystal glass with human agency and fleeting vanity; the steel glass with labor and causation, the crystal glass with conceit and incontinence. For Gascoigne, imaginative inventions are perforce material and causal: language and human imagination are part of the divinely fashioned temporal register. Like the metaphor of the mirror that is calibrated to material changes in the physical object, Gascoigne's poetics express the material facticity of historical change, rather than the progress of human thought.

Gascoigne was not alone in registering the impact of the crystal glass mirror on the mirror metaphor. Stephen Batman, for one, embraces the new invention, titling his 1569 book of moral emblems A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation. He explains in the epistle to the reader that he means the book to be

This cristall glasse wherein we may learne godly reformation, whose brightness shineth not the beholders therof in this world a light to every christian man, but in the world to come a most precious and everlasting brightnes in endles felicitie. As I sayd, a manifest shew of all coloured abuses that raigne in every state, and set in the frame of most plentiful and christian examples. The substance wherof is the perfect glasse of godley reformation beautifed with the cristall light of all celestial vertues, right fruitful for every man to carry and most nedeful for this our present tyme.⁴¹

For Batman, the crystal glass perfectly figures for the reader an ideal reformation: its reflection shows the abuses of the world while its substance makes the reader mindful of the crystalline spheres of heaven.

For the puritan Thomas Salter, writing in 1579 his Mirrhor of Modestie, the glass mirror is so negatively identified with worldly pride that it can in no wise evoke the celestial spheres, least of all in its glassy surface. Salter explains that the Mirrhor is a manual for matrons on proper religious training for young women.

In my iudgemente there is nothyng more meete, especially for young Maidens, then a Mirrhor, there in to see and beholde how to order their dooyng, I meane not a christall Mirrhor, made by handie Arte, by whiche Maidens nowadaies, dooe onely take delight daiely to tricke and trim their tresses, standyng tootyng twoo howers by the Clocke, lookyng now on this side, now on that, least any thyng should be lackyng needeful to further Pride, not suffering so muche as a hare to hang out of order, no I meane no such mirrhor, but the Mirrhor, I mean is made of another matter, and is of muche more worthe than any Christall Mirrhor, for as the one teacheth how to attire the outwarde bodie, so the other guideth to garnishe the inwarde mynde, and maketh it meete for vertue, and therefore is intituled a Mirrhore meete for Matrones and Maidens, for matrones to knowe how to traine up such young maidends how to behave them selves to attaine to the feate of good fame.⁴²

Like Gascoigne, Salter avers that his text is decidedly not a glass mirror. But unlike Gascoigne, who disdains the crystal glass in favor of a steel glass, Salter favors an entirely abstracted mirror metaphor, one that “guideth to garnishe the inwarde mynde.” Salter strips his metaphor of physical attributes until it is only as material as the language that conveys it: the word mirrhor itself, for instance, or the book that goes by that name. Salter compares spiritual contemplation not to any actual mirror, but to an idea evoked by the word mirrhor.

With the invention of the crystal glass mirror, the time-honored metaphor of the book as mirror seems to have become too material, too attached to worldly thought and reflection. Acknowledging the incursion, both Batman and Salter qualify their use of the mirror metaphor, distinguishing the worldly crystal glass from a more spiritual heavenly reflection in order to exhort their readers toward spiritual contemplation. But there are notable differences in the means by which each author qualifies the mirror metaphor to satisfy the ends of spiritual contemplation. In Batman's 1569 text, the mirror metaphor functions allegorically, referencing two hierarchically ordered levels of meaning: the reflection of worldly vices on the one hand and the contemplation of celestial matters on the other. These levels of reference resemble one another not through any moral, ethical, or ideal similitude, but rather through the crystalline substance of the metaphor that links them, a substantive resemblance that ultimately points up their true differences. Salter's mirror metaphor, by contrast, divorces itself from any material resemblance, from any actual experience of doing up one's hair in a given mirror, for instance, to establish a correspondence between spiritual contemplation and the book that directs that purpose. For Salter, the metaphor of the mirror is itself closer to spiritual contemplation precisely because it is absent of any material signs or shows. Salter establishes a conceptual parity or resemblance between language and contemplation by excising the metaphor of any material references. Salter's metaphor is thus semiological rather than allegorical in its functioning.

Gascoigne's Steele Glas, on the other hand, reflects an image of Renaissance poetics that is neither allegorical nor semiological, but mediated or tempered. For Gascoigne, the crystal glass mirror holds forth the false promise of ideation divorced from material and temporal causation. What distinguishes the steel glass is its capacity to reflect temporality, to reflect, that is, the passage of time as a particular property of the divinely created universe of physical matter. Using a metaphor of tempered steel to reflect temporal matter, Gascoigne describes in his own words the meanings already inherent in matter. For Gascoigne, only the conspicuously material metaphor of the steel glass, which is both reversionary and prospecting, and both imaginative and mundane, can define the present moment in its relation to both the past and the future, as a moment of historical change.

Notes

1. William Salmon gives advice on the polishing of a steel glass in his 1701 Polygraphice: “If these Glasses are sullied or made dull with Air or any thick Vapour, you must clear them by rubbing, not with Woolen or Linnen, but with a piece of Deer or Goats Skin, wiping it in an oblique line”; quoted in Geoffrey Wills, English Looking Glasses (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1965), 144.

2. Eleanor S. Godfrey, The Development of English Glassmaking, 1560-1640 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 235; and R. W. Symonds, “English Looking-glasses,” The Connoisseur 25, no. 515 (Mar. 1950): 8-9. Godfrey says that pennyware mirrors produced a “small but well-defined image”; Symonds, on the other hand, claims that the prevalence of steel and silver mirrors was due to the poor quality of these early glass mirrors.

3. Patrick McCray, Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 1999), 62, 122-23.

4. On the production of broad or plate glass, see R. J. Charleston, English Glass and the Glass Used in England, circa 400-1940 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984), 38-39, 71-80.

5. See chap. 1 of Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, Histoire du Miroir (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1998), recently translated as The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine H. Jewett (New York: Routledge, 2001), 9-34.

6. Godfrey, Development of English Glassmaking, 236. On the history of mirrors, see also W. A. Thorpe, English Glass, 2nd ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1949); Geoffrey Wills, “From Polished Metal to Looking-Glass,” Country Life (23 Oct. 1958): 939-43; and H. Syer Cuming, “On Mirrors,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 17 (1861): 279-88.

7. Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 71.

8. Jean Des Caurres, Œuvres Morales et Divers (Paris, 1584; Ann Arbor: University Microfilms 3907), 603. I am grateful to Suzanne Verderber for checking my translation here.

9. Ben Jonson, Cynthia's Revels, in The Oxford Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), II. iii. 53-55.

10. Cited in Cuming, “On Mirrors,” 286-87.

11. Benjamin Goldberg, The Mirror and Man (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 146-47; Melchior-Bonnet, Histoire du Miroir, 12; Grabes, Mutable Glass, 15.

12. Deborah Shuger, “The ‘I’ of the Beholder: Renaissance Mirrors,” Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Phildelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1998), 21-41, esp. 37.

13. On the preponderance of speculum titles, see Sister Ritamary Bradley, “Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Medieval Literature,” Speculum 29 (1954): 100-115. On mirror book titles, see Grabes's Mutable Glass; and also Melchior-Bonnet, Histoire du Miroir, 113-15.

14. On the mind as a reflection of the divine mens, see Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 150. On the mirror as an image of the analogic correspondence between the world and the book, see Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994), 122-23. For an account of classical epistemology within Christianity from the patristic period through the end of the thirteenth century, see Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

15. At its most extreme, this association of the mirror with magic meant that the mirror was often depicted as “the devil's glass.” Mechoir-Bonnet has an excellent chapter “Les Grimaces du Diable,” in Histoire du Miroir, 189-220.

16. Frederick Goldin traces the mirror in the writings of Augustine and, noting the ideal and material significance of the mirror, argues that medieval literature, even secular love literature, uses the mirror to join the ideal and the material. See The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967). See also Benjamin Goldberg's chapter 7 on the medieval mirror, which charts the mirror in scholastic commentary and ends with a focus on mirrors in The Divine Comedy, in The Mirror and Man, 112-34.

17. Heinrich Schwarz, “The Mirror of the Artist and the Mirror of the Devout,” Studies in the History of Art Dedicated to William E. Suida on His Eightieth Birthday (New York: Phaideon for the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1959), 90-105, esp. 102.

18. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 168-69, and 186; see also her Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

19. Gascoigne continued, in other writings, to see satire as the critical turning point in his personal reformation from prodigal youth to reformed maturity. In a later epistolary bid for Elizabeth's patronage, he appealed to her to “Behold here (learned pryncesse) nott Gascoigne the ydle poett, wryting tryfles of the green knighte, but Gascoigne the Satyricall wryter, medytating eche Muse that may expresse his reformacion.” See the dedicatory epistle to Hemetes the Heremyte in Posies (London, 1575). For an account of the censorship of An Hundreth Sundry Flower and Gascoigne's attempts to regain a favorable “estate,” see R. W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 114-57. On the trope of the reformed prodigal, see Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

20. All citations from The Steele Glas are taken from George Gascoigne, Certayne notes of instruction in English Verse … The Steele Glas … The compleynt of Philomene …, in English Reprints, vol. 3, ed. Arber (1869; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1966), here 42-43. Page references will subsequently appear parenthetically in the text.

21. The 1573 edition of A Hundreth Sundry Flowers came before the high commission and was partially confiscated even after revisions were made in 1576. See Prouty's 1942 edition of the 1573 text, George Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundry Flowers, ed. Charles Taylor Prouty (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1942); and Prouty's biography, George Gascoigne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).

22. This passage is an interesting example of the hermaphroditic conjunction of Gascoigne and Satyra in the poem's speaker. Satyra, though not strictly ancient, is a classical figure insofar as she is associated with Philomel. Lamenting that “the world goeth stil awry,” this voice seems to speak from the vantage point of the past. But the metaphor of cannon shot locates the speaker in the present and suggests a speaker familiar with sixteenth-century warfare, as Gascoigne would have been from his military service.

23. Thomas Starkey, England in the Reign of Henry VIII, a dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset (1538), EETS e.s. 32, ed. Sidney J. Herrtage and J. M. Cowper (London, 1878), I.iii.80.

24. See Erwin Panofsky's discussion of concetto in Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph J. S. Peake (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), 66, 82, 118-19.

25. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd. ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), I.i.33.

26. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, incontinent can mean immediately, suddenly, “in continuous time.” An incontinent or immediate event happens in continuous time, but it happens too fast to be explained causally; thus it is almost hypercontinuous in that it seems to disrupt proper temporal causation.

27. Eleanor Godfrey, Development of English Glassmaking, 235.

28. McCray, Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice, 130-32.

29. Glaziers are mentioned as early as the thirteenth century, and a Glaziers Company was first formed in 1328 under Edward III, but in general glazing refers to the cutting, annealing, and fitting of quarrels and other cut pieces of glass into lead frames, rather than glassblowing per se. The first published manual for glaziers is Walter Gedde, A booke of Sundry Draughtes, principally serving for glasiers and not impertinent for plasterers, and gardiners besides sundry other professions whereunto is annexed the manner how to anniel in Glas and also the true forme of the Fornace and the secretes thereof (London, 1615). The book offers patterns and instructions for outfitting leaded window frames, as well as for painting and firing images onto glass, or annealing. In addition to glaziers, there was a company of glass-sellers in England, but there was no glassblower's guild.

30. McCray, Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice, 56.

31. The Venetian glass industry is a prime example of “import substitution,” whereby a locale that is involved in the transport and resale of goods assumes production of those selfsame goods, transforming an import commodity into an export commodity. Italian states also did this with the trade in textiles. See Herman van der Wee, “European Long-Distance Trade, 1350-1750,” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 25. See also van der Wee's The Rise and Decline of Urban Industries in Italy and in the Low Countries: Late Middle Ages-Early-Modern Times (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1988).

32. Godfrey, Development of English Glassmaking, notes that the “cheapness of the ingredients, the high value of the product, and a tightly guarded monopoly of skill brought glassmakers prosperity and a high social status.” Members of the lesser nobility in France, Bohemia, and Italy not only owned glasshouses but worked as craftsmen at their own furnaces (4). Godfrey goes on to note that by 1640 the tradition of the owner-craftsman glassmaker had all but died out in England due to Sir Robert Mansell's administration of the glass monopoly (253). Still, glass was perceived as a “polite” and noble substance. Merret's translation of Neri states that “Its use in drinking vessels and other things profitable to mans service is much more gentle, graceful, and noble than any metall or whatsoever stone fit to make such works”; both the crafting and the of glass objects were identified with gentlemen. Christopher Merret, Arte of Glasse (London, 1662), sig. A1r, translating Antonio Neri, Ars Vitraria (Venice, 1612).

33. Godfrey, Development of English Glassmaking, 7.

34. McCray, Glassmaking in Renaissance Venice, 22-25, 126-32.

35. The evidence that Gutenberg was involved in mirror-making stems from a law suit brought against the partnership. Douglas McMurtrie, The Gutenberg Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 93-126. All of the known legal documents pertaining to Gutenberg have been collected and translated by McMurtrie in this collection. The proceedings that mention mirror-making were the result of a suit filed by George Dritzehen on behalf of his deceased brother Andrew, who was one of four original partners (the others being Gutenberg, Heilmann, and Riffe). The suit seeks either remuneration of Andrew's original investment by refund or admission into the partnership. The defense was based on a written partnership contract, which said that in the case of death all tools and implements of art and all works perfected by the instruments were to remain in the partnership. Gutenberg made two contracts with these partners. The first, in 1438, concerned “the polishing of stones and the manufacture of looking glasses.” The second does not specify the product of manufacture but stipulates that it is to be in force for five years (1438-43) and that its objective, “the exploitation of other ideas,” depends upon Gutenberg instructing his partners “in new arts.” McMurtrie surmises that printing may be one of those arts on the grounds that one witness gave testimony that he was hired by the partners to assist in a printing operation. We can assume, because the use of lead is mentioned by one of the witnesses, that the partnership was indeed also making glass “pennyware” mirrors as planned. These partnership agreements, protecting the arts and instruments for a period of five years, seem to be more concerned with protecting trade secrets than with rights to the initial investments, since they agree that, in the case of death, the initial investment will be disbursed to the heirs of the deceased after the period of five years. The council of Strasbourg ordered Gutenberg to pay 15 gulden (all that Andrew had paid of his promised investment of 100 gulden) to Andrew's brothers.

36. Godfrey, Development of English Glassmaking, 178-79.

37. Hugh Tait, ed., Five Thousand Years of Glass (London: British Museum Press, 1991), 174. On the private glass industry in Tyrol, see Reino Liefkes, ed., Glass (London: V& A Publications, 1997), 56-57, 60.

38. See Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), esp. 173.

39. Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the xix Propositions (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 56-59.

40. I am grateful to Tyler Smith here for his insight that “strange” might be a punning commentary on the oddity of foreign peasants.

41. Stephen Batman, A Christall Glasse of Christian Reformation wherein the godly maye behold the coloured abuses used in this our tyme (London, 1569), sig. A3r.

42. Thomas Salter, A mirrhor mete for all mothers, matrones, and maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie [1579], ed. J. P. Collier, Illustrations of Old English Literature, Ser. 4, no. 5 (London, 1866), 5.

I am grateful to Margreta de Grazia for her comments on this article.